Kimberly Reyes is an award-winning poet, essayist, popular culture critic, and visual culture scholar. She worked as a music and entertainment reporter, a news producer, an advertising copywriter, and a Silicon Valley tech writer before she transitioned to creative writing. She's been awarded grants, bursaries, fellowships, prizes, residencies and scholarships from the Poetry Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, Tin House Workshops, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Miami Writers Institute, the Arts Council of Ireland, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hambidge, Cave Canem, the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, the Munster Literature Centre, Culture Ireland, Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, the Community of Writers, The Watering Hole, and many other places.
Kimberly is the author of the upcoming poetry collection Bloodletting (Omnidawn, Spring 2025) and of the poetry collections vanishing point. (Omnidawn 2023), Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn 2019)—finalist for the 2020 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award and for Civil Coping Mechanisms' 2017 Mainline Competition, and Warning Coloration (dancing girl press 2018)—finalist for the Two Sylvias Press 2017 Chapbook Competition. She is the author of the essay collection Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills 2019), winner of the 2018 Michael Rubin Prose Chapbook Award.
Her writing has been featured in/on The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Time.com, The New York Post, The Village Voice, Alternative Press, ESPN the Magazine, Jane, NY1 News, The Best American Poetry, poets.org, american poets, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, The Stinging Fly, RTÉ Radio, The Irish Examiner, Film Ireland, Obsidian, The Acentos Review, and The Feminist Wire, among other places. Kimberly is a Pushcart prize nominee, and her writing has been anthologized in various genres. Her work as a film critic earned her accreditation from the Motion Picture Association in 2022.
Kimberly has taught poetry abroad at Ó Bhéal and the Munster Literature Centre in Ireland, and stateside at San Quentin State Prison, the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, and the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. A Black Nuyorican, Kimberly sits on the Irish Fulbright Commission's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Board. She is currently a teacher of creative writing, science fiction, and film studies, a doctoral student in English, and an assistant poetry editor at Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.